Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
Welcome to Songs and Stories from Home as we continue to Remember the Dream. This week The Times They Are A Changin’
As this country moves in jerks and starts to define and redefine the meaning of our founding documents it’s important to know where we came from and so better understand where we are now and to give us some sense of where we might want to go from here. Are there enough of us today who truly believe we are all created equal with the same inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Can we ever agree that everyone is equally precious in the site of the creator? Can there be a consensus, in our diverse and divided country, that we are indeed one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all? Are there enough of us to hold that truth as self evident at the same time the President makes it his job to pound into our collective psyche we not one nation.
My sense is that Mark Twain is right when he says that though history doesn’t repeat itself it does rhyme. There are certainly enough rhymes connecting the Presidential election season of 1968 and the one we are going through now in 2020. As then the streets are alive and sometimes ablaze with people who for too long have believed they have not been treated equally or fairly. Who I believe have not been treated equally or fairly. Now as then one major presidential candidate spouts fear, shouts law and order, and warns us the American way of life is under attack. The other Presidential candidate, in 1968 it was Hubert Humphrey, the Happy Warrior, appeals to our better nature and the dream that it’s not too late to create a more perfect union out of the raw material that is America.
Fifty-two years ago we voted our fears and not our hopes. By doing so we ended up with someone, Richard Nixon, who forever appealed to our fears until his corruption became so clear we couldn’t not see it and an exhausted nation said enough. We have a chance to do it differently in the coming election inspired in part by the life and legacy of John Lewis who was part of so many moments in the Civil Rights Movement who never stopped believing in this country and our better angels, who never stopped preaching or practicing non-violence no matter how badly he was beaten or no matter how loudly others spoke of meeting violence with violence. 100 years and 3 days before John Lewis walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge and changed American history Abraham Lincoln spoke to the nation and speaks to us today, saying in part, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
